Divide and Rule. Walid Bitar

Bitar was born in Beirut, settled in Canada, studied and published in the U.S. and travelled widely, and his poetry addresses current geopolitical realities with an informed and idiosyncratic gaze. The book is firmly engaged, in complicated ways, with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as a look at the titles in the table of contents confirms: “Mission Creep,” “Power-Sharing Formula,” “Divide and Rule,” “Waterboarding,” “The Barricade Auction” etc. Bitar was a teaching/writing fellow at Iowa University in the early ‘90s, where he studied with John Ashbery, Heather McHugh, and Jorie Graham. Ashbery himself recommended his first full collection, 2 Guys on Holy Land, to the editors at Wesleyan University Press. Bitar has been widely published in journals across North America, including The Denver Quarterly, New American Writing and Maisonneuve.